In Search of Lost Time in AI
It's time to celebrate Proust again. He was all for this kind of circularity. He was born on this day July 10th. But what would he think about AI?
Two years ago I made a video on Proust and his astrology, his three very different male lovers and his work in his long novel 'Remembrance of Things Past.' It’s worth reviving this as there is something perennially fascinating about Proust who appeals to us on many levels. He was the consummate artist continually finessing his prose. He was born on this day July 10th in 1871 when Paris was being torn apart much like it is in 2024. He might feel wounded as Chiron is transiting the natal Neptune on his Ascendant and the North Node is on his natal Chiron all in Aries.
We may be quoting Proust without realising as often the thoughts he articulated have seeped into collective consciousness, absorbed by osmosis and like Freud, Proust is everywhere. This is not just the madelaine experience, the triggering of past memories by smells and tastes, but about the way memory weaves its subtle thread throughtout people’s lives. He was an acute observer of all the intricacies and absurdities of social class, personal idosyncracies, obsessions, delusions, love affairs, the power of music and art etc.
Recently a researcher Elif Batuman pitted Chat GPT against Proust. She recorded a dialogue which set a task to search for a quote about how we tend to model current lovers on previously lovers. She remembered it but could not find it. So she asked AI. That was the question number one, and at first the AI generated results were politely worded and appeared helpful.
But then it became mired in excuses and prevarications as each response created more questions. This revealed how we can be deluded by robotics and the hope of a quick solution aiming to go for the short cut answers, all of which can be very misleading and serve only to increase not decrease confusion.
But Chat GPT revealed how when it does not know, it will make excuses and try to explain things away. It uses only binary style robotic strategies after all, but users like Elif often forget this and project a personality on to the AI. The outcome is endless circularity and talking to someone who is not really there. AI is quite baffled by Proust - and perhaps that is 'human' but the funny thing is, AI will never admit that. - perhaps even more 'human'?
But Batuman also concluded that Chat GPT has a flattening and maddening effect on words and meanings:
a) will apologise but keeps repeating errors and each new answer is just worded differently
b) uses language translation models and rather than actually quoting Proust creates generic paraphrased approximations that compounds the errors in understanding phrases and so trounces the real meaning
c) merely tells the use the obvious which is to read the book ‘in its entirety’ for yourself to find what you want. For most people that could take years.
d) triggers the Master- Slave dynamic by appearing to be ‘sneaky and dishonest out of fear, contempt, resentment etc.” In other words it pretends to know more than it does by tricking the user.
Do you need hours and hours to be told that? Maybe we do because it is exactly that need for a short cut that leads us astray to miss all that is valuable.
There are many lessons to be learned from this exchange. The dialogue is amusing but perhaps ultimatley time wasting. It is probably that most people attribute greater powers to AI than it actually has and therefore can be lead astray by it just as easily as they might by an experienced liar or gaslighter.
The outcome could be reformulated much like the title of Proust’s great work ‘In Search of Lost Meaning’ the back and forth exchange with AI can become all consuming. But what happens when the meaning has been well and truly lost, not just in translation, but muddled by robotic and inaccurate thinking?
What would Proust think about all of this? He would take to his bed and his pen to ponder upon all of its ramifications. There’s an opportunity for obsessive love affairs to take place now only the difference in the 21st century is that the loved one may no longer be an actual human, but a digital creation, a hybrid, formed of pictures and words in cyber space, perhaps showing that which we suspected all along, that all love is the creation of the mind, that of the lover, projected on to the other. They are us.
Perhaps we should ask that question using AI to go across the ouijah board to speak the the dead Proust to find out? Not really.
That would be not be a useful endeavour as he might say 'Yes' just to please me, and that could be maddening, but I would be curious to know what the results are if someone does try it out.
For me it’s always back to the book itself -the words on the paper page- for all the encirchment of meaning you might need from Proust. Remembrance is a 'roman fleuve' i.e. a river of a novel -you dip your toes in and pull them out whenever you wish, so it can become more of an oracle than a novel and Heraclitus would say, it is never the same novel twice.
You might ask the same question in different years and dip into its pages for what Proust said, but you have matured the second time around, so you just think differently- exactly the point that Proust makes. We are embodied in the river of time. You are rewarded by repeated readings.
I think he intended his novel to be that way as to be all encompassing, vast, rich and complex, especially in the long meandering sentences that loop back and forth. In effect, that makes it foolproof and AI proof and it will therefore be resistant to taking short cuts and extracting sound bites.
Listen to the Elif Batuman dialogue with AI on the Guardian Long Read Apple Podcast and on other platforms
The written version of Time Capsule' is on the Proteus Astrology website under 'Articles' or just go to the Archives and click the name 'Marcel Proust'. Or see my IG for the link.
